We review the biggest and most important stories from the past week, including …

Share this story

It's early December and winter is starting to grab the northern hemisphere with its icy hand. Here's some hot news from the week gone by to keep you warm as you sit in front of the fireplace—or run the fireplace screensaver.

The new version of µTorrent will use uTP for downloads instead of TCP. Some are concerned that this will enable BitTorrent to bypass congestion controls, but that's not the case. Using UDP makes BitTorrent traffic light up like a Christmas tree in even the simplest traffic shaping equipment, so we can be confident that there's some serious congestion control built into µTorrent. Otherwise, ISPs would clamp down on Torrent traffic faster than you can say "deep packet inspection."

Open source media player Songbird finally hit the big 1.0 this week. We looked at the release and liked what we saw. Songbird 1.0 uses Mozilla's XUL for its interface and has an open architecture designed to play nicely with a number of media formats. There is still some work to be done when it comes to integration with online stores, but it's definitely a viable replacement for iTunes and Windows Media Player if you're looking for one.

Songbird 1.0

DRM in video games is a hotly debated topic and this week we saw two major players in the industry land on opposite sides of the issue. Valve's Gabe Newell calls it "just dumb," but Microsoft Games for Windows Community Manager believes that the problem isn't DRM—it's all in the implementation and the attitude.

While Python 3.0 and Songbird 1.0 may have garnered much of the attention this week, they weren't the only releases of note. KDE 4.2 beta 1 hit servers, and we ran through the new features and improvements. Our verdict? It's a major step forward for 4.2, especially the Plasma technology.